Open up the Silos! Expose Mentors and Students page to Mentors

[neelbhat88]

So we were all talking about how as mentors when we log into Imua we don't get a sense of being part of a larger group. For example, yesterday I noticed Utu hasn't done any of her testing stuff yet but since she is the only Sophomore I have I had no idea if other sophomores had completed any testing yet. As a mentor I have no visibility into any of the other mentors or the other students. So what do I do? I log in as an org admin, click on either the students or mentors page, and then get a sense of what is going on outside of me and my three students. We all realized that we basically only log in as an org admin since we see how things as a whole are moving and then only log in as our mentor roles to send tasks. Unfortunately, we are spoiled and have these 2 roles. Most of our users that are mentors are only mentors and so don't get this sense of being part of a larger whole by seeing who the mentors and students are in their program and how they are all doing along with the 3 (or however many) they are focused on.

The simplest thing we can do is to expose the Mentors and Students pages that Org Admins see to the Mentor also. Their dashboard would still show them just their students, but they can click on the Mentors or Students pages and see the rest of the users in the organization they are part of. We would just hide the ability to create/delete mentors and students from these pages for the mentors.

Do you guys see any reason to not start with that first step? @kylegracey mainly looking for your thoughts here because we're all on the same page on this since we just all talked about it

[neelbhat88]

Obviously a lot more can be done with this as we move forward with things like notifications, the news feed, etc but exposing the mentors and students pages would be a very easy first step

[kylegracey]

Oi. Can we hold off on this for now and focus on the boatload of issues we have with the current product? Please? Pretty please? I know it's literally the flick of a switch to turn on and off from the back-end, and sounds SO easy to do. But it's one of those 'throw more features in! more! more! now more!' things.

Put your biases aside for a second. Seriously. ALL 5 us designed the software and care about more than just our students. We ALL have org admin (shit... SUPER admin) accounts that we use on a regular basis. We absolutely do not count as normal 'mentors'. Normal mentors don't even realize that there IS an org admin view. I promise you they will be just fine waiting a little bit for a real implementation of this feature.

In the most non-dickish way possible... this 'throw more in' conversation is getting really tiring. I thought one of the realizations of trying to 'throw events in' on top of tasks (which were also just 'thrown in') was that it may sounds SO easy... but it creates more problems than it fixes. That's not how you build good software. It's how you build bloated confusing software (... there's an argument that we already are bloated and confusing).

Let me be clear. This is another concept I love. User-to-user transparency was core piece of even those original design mockups we use in our pitch deck. But can we please put it on the schedule instead of just throwing it in because it came up in a conversation today?

[neelbhat88]

Kyle, we put this in the "Polish milestone" because we wanted to start the conversation of how to address this and not necessarily do it right away, otherwise it would be in Sprint 7. This "Polish" milestone is where we ALL can dump ideas on things we find would make the current functionality we have (nothing new) better and give users more value. This also came from us using the tool daily as mentors and also seeing the general mentor login rates (which are very low). The idea here is to put things up that we can all discuss and then pick and choose the ones we work

[kylegracey]

Awesome. Love it. Not a fan of the first step being to expose those views though. Let’s get the new design into place and we can start figuring out where those types of things can show up.

Are our permissions set up for this? The way things are right now, If I’m a mentor and can view a kid that’s not assigned to me, can I change their information?

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 5:36 PM, neelbhat88 notifications@github.com wrote:

Kyle, we put this in the "Polish milestone" because we wanted to start the conversation of how to address this and not necessarily do it right away, otherwise it would be in Sprint 7. This "Polish" milestone is where we ALL can dump ideas on things we find would make the current functionality we have (nothing new) better and give users more value. This also came from us using the tool daily as mentors and also seeing the general mentor login rates (which are very low). The idea here is to put things up that we can all discuss and then pick and choose the ones we work

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/neelbhat88/imuadev/issues/488#issuecomment-57552916

[ttapers]

Nope, front end permissions will have to be implemented based on what we decide for how "open" the silos should be. That's certainly a major task that we talked about - most of the front end permission stuff is currently handled by only exposing certain pages to certain user types.

[neelbhat88]

Yeah we would implement that on the front end. But for this specific case I dont see anything wrong with letting mentors change other students data (if they even do). It's not like I have a special reason why I can change my current students data other than an arbitrary "pairing".

Neel [Sent via mobile phone] On Oct 1, 2014 6:01 PM, "Pat Hogan" notifications@github.com wrote:

Nope, front end permissions will have to be implemented based on what we decide for how "open" the silos should be. That's certainly a major task that we talked about - most of the front end permission stuff is currently handled by only exposing certain pages to certain user types.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/neelbhat88/imuadev/issues/488#issuecomment-57555553.

[kylegracey]

This sounds a lot more like a new feature than 'polish' to me. Haha

[neelbhat88]

If it's allowing mentors to see all other students (and let them change the data also - it really doesn't matter if they can) then its just showing them something thats currently hidden from them because we made the assumption that mentors only care about their assigned students and hid the rest. From actual experience, it feels like that assumption is wrong now. So given that, I wouldn't say thats a new feature at all, its just hidden from mentors. Yes its "new" to us since this came up today from a casual conversation we had today, but unless we want to make this more than it needs to be I would consider it "polish" and nowhere near something like "Events" which literally doesn't exist in our system. But thats just me, maybe I don't know how to build good software

If we want to move this from "Polish" to "Future" that's totally fine, feel free to move it

Neel [Sent via mobile phone] On Oct 1, 2014 6:19 PM, "Kyle Gracey" notifications@github.com wrote:

This sounds a lot more like a new feature than 'polish' to me. Haha

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/neelbhat88/imuadev/issues/488#issuecomment-57557120.

[kylegracey]

We need some love back in this thread.

You did ask my opinion though. And my opinion is that for the front end, it definitely deserves the attention and thinking that goes into a new feature. I'm sorry if thats frustrating. Like I've said before, you guys obviously have the majority on this. If you want to just turn it on, go for it.

[neelbhat88]

Perfect, your opinion is exactly what we originally wanted and now we know your thoughts on this. I would love more details from you from a front end stand point what you are thinking of with this, but lets save that for when we all meet next in person. I think having a conversation amongst all of us about this high level concept of letting mentors and students see and feel like they are part of a whole is still a valid convo we should all have so we can see what aspects of that we can get done soon and what stuff waits until later. And by soon I mean when we talk about it, not right away.

Neel Bhat

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Kyle Gracey notifications@github.com wrote:

We need some love back in this thread.

[image: draft_lens2572822module20988502photo_1237139184puppieshugging] https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3719539/4485200/cc977d82-49c6-11e4-978d-ba7d0b0172e0.jpg

You did ask my opinion though. And my opinion is that for the front end, it definitely deserves the attention and thinking that goes into a new feature. I'm sorry if thats frustrating. Like I've said before, you guys obviously have the majority on this. If you want to just turn it on, go for it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/neelbhat88/imuadev/issues/488#issuecomment-57560360.

[neelbhat88]

And just to clarify, no hard feelings on my end, just was hoping for more of a convo to ensue so we can all understand everyone's view points and come to some sort of understanding like we did with Events

[neelbhat88]

@kylegracey I'm not going to lie I've been thinking about this all night basically, to put my mind at ease can you brain dump what you have in mind to address this concern of mentors feeling lonely and not being able to compare their performance or their students to others. It'll put my mind at ease once I know what the vision is. Also feel free to swing by 1871 later if its easier to just explain in person